Yeah imap and 2FA is a problem. I looked into it some time ago because I wanted 
to implement it for my employer because we have a medium-sized commercial 
email-platform. Adding 2FA to a web-application is no problem these days. But 
with imap the only chance I see are only workarounds for the setup like 
application specific passwords or oauth-tokens. Both are not that simple to 
implement actually depending on your used technology for your user database.
You might be able to hack yourself some true 2FA into your imap-server like 
Dovecot with a custom implementation but what would the workflow would look 
like?
You cannot tell through imap “trust this device for x amount of days” since 
clients do not offer an Interface for something like that and nothing like this 
is in the RFCs for imap. And they don’t have an Interface for the second factor 
(might use the password input though). 
Thus the only chance to not have a completely annoying workflow would mean that 
you need to keep open the connection with the imap-server. IMAPidle might do 
that. But idle is not available on mobile clients. Thus on your phone you would 
to log in to your account each time you open up the app. 
So it would be actually somehow doable but the costs for the provider would be 
just too high. They would need to develop some authentication extension for 
their used server-application. Then they would probably need to convince 
client-developers for adding support for this to their clients. And now we are 
in the “only players like Google are big enough to be important enough that 
client-devs might consider it” ant then they have to support it. And for the 
mobile clients that will be annoying and will probably create lots of calls. 
I guess they still have imap running but allow it only from their 
webmail-interfaces via some internal connections. 

Yes, it sucks for you and anyone with a decent e-mail-workflow but I kind of 
understand it. 

Best,

Niels

> On 25. Jun 2021, at 02:36, Harvey Leff <hsl...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> alleged

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